2007 Christmas Issue: Christmas Gingerbread Houses

Gingerbread Houses

Christmas at our house means gingerbread house time. We made some simple ones when
the children were little. You know the kind - graham crackers and frosting - but that’s not what we do now. Before everyone comes home, I bake a house.

Rick starts by choosing a house pattern and making cardboard pattern pieces for the walls and roof. Generally I have to double the recipes for gingerbread to make the house but it goes quickly now because I have a method.


I put parchment paper on a baking pan, roll the dough out, cut around the pattern and remove the extra dough. Since I don’t pick anything up, I no longer stretch the rectangles into some frustrating parallelogram or wonky trapezoid.


When they are cool, I glue the pieces together. The first time I glued a house it was without appreciation for the searing temperature of melted sugar. I thought I had to hurry and while hurrying I dripped melted sugar on my hand. It took about two weeks to heal.

Now I wear neoprene gloves and move slowly and carefully. With all the pieces arranged on the kitchen counter and an aluminum foil-covered board at the ready I melt sugar in a large frying pan. Sugar melts into sticky syrup. I dip two sides of a wall into the goo and then place the wall on the board. I know that there’s enough time to move slowly and deliberately.

I worry a little about putting roof on. I have to use a spoon to drip glue on the top of the wall and then place the roof parts. The small pieces of the chimney go on easily and they add style. Often I put a few trees or shrubs or a snowman in the “yard” or pour the sugar/syrup into a “walkway” in front of the door. The sugar glue hardens and the house waits for candy.

At our house all the food we share has to be vegan and that, just a couple of years ago, limited our choices of candies for decoration but now one can get just about anything in a vegan formula so we get pretty darn colorful.

Christmas Eve is decorating time. We get some drinks, turn on the holiday music and put the house on the dining room table surrounding it with bowls of candies. I make lots of frosting for the decorations and we get the kitchen scissors, knives and our fingers very gooey in the process.


Often each of us claims a section of the house and gets to work, a process that means the house looks different from each angle. We cover it with enough candy-tile to make Anton Gaudi jealous and us happy.

As soon as it’s finished it is okay to start eating it but usually the sampling of materials has already made us sick on sugar by then. Our gingerbread house is the best 50,000 calorie project of the year.



Basic Gingerbread House Dough
From recipes.vegansource.com
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 Teaspoon baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 or 3 tsps ground ginger (use a really good quality spice)
1 or 2 tsp ground cinnamon (Vietnamese is my favorite)
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1 cup molasses
2 Tbs soymilk, or as needed

In a large bowl stir together flour, baking soda, salt, ginger and cinnamon. (This is the step where our kitchen floor gets messy.)
In a saucepan, combine the shortening, brown sugar, and molasses over low heat.
Stir occasionally until the shortening is melted and the sugar is dissolved,
but still slightly grainy. Remove from the heat and let the mixture cool to lukewarm.
Gradually add the molasses mixture to the dry ingredients, mixing until well blended.
Add enough soymilk to make a firm dough.

Gather the dough into a ball, and cover with plastic wrap.
Let the dough rest for at least 20 minutes. (When tightly sealed, the dough will keep for up to 1 week in the refrigerator. Bring to room temperature before rolling.)
Preheat oven to 325 F. Position rack in the center of the oven.
Use ungreased baking sheets or use parchment paper.
With a lightly floured rolling pin, roll out the dough 1/4" thick, and cut out desired shapes.
Bake until the edges are slightly brown, about 15 minutes.
Makes enough for 1 small gingerbread house (8" x 8").

Gingerbread House Glue*
Pour a layer of sugar about 1" thick in a heavy frying pan.
Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon
until it melts. This makes a quick-hardening, edible glue.
*Caution, this is VERY hot, do not taste or touch!!

Frosting Glue
This frosting works well if made with egg whites but it's okay with water
1/3 cup water (or 3 egg whites)
1/2 t cream of tartar
about a pound of confectioner's sugar
Whip till smooth if you can stand the noise of your mixer.

People tell me that these can be sprayed with a clear finish and saved for years but we nibble on the peanut brittle and chocolate until the house seems less than glorious and then we get serious and eat the gingerbread.

The Lizard At My Feet - Story Jar

The Lizard at My Feet

Folks around here probably share a standard image for hospitals or doctor’s offices. When Em and Jay had ear infections or nasty, runny noses with hacking coughs, we walked into the old Martin Street School where we found comfort and care with Dr. Tartaglia.

When Em and Jay were young, we took a short trip to Zimbabwe. Our pre-trip medical shots caused us to wince but not as much as the assurance there was no need to worry during the trip because we were assured that they could fix most anything when we got back!

I hadn’t really worried until I heard that but they were true to their promise. When we came back, Jay did need a bit of fixing and fix him they did.

Malaysia was different. We’d be there for well over a year. Medical needs had to be considered and we wished for a crystal ball with a medical degree.

We knew, from our contacts at the University of Buffalo, that there was an American, for-profit hospital in Kuala Lumpur but we also knew that the quality and availability might be different. We needed to take certain precautions.
We started with hepatitis shots. Em had a reaction to the second one in that series but the reaction didn’t start for a few weeks and we were in Malaysia when fever and sickness turned Em into a sweaty, slightly green, little girl. We found a charming Sari-clad, Indian doctor at that hospital in Kuala Lumpur (KL).

I can’t remember the doctor’s name but we saw her a few times and she worked through blood tests and x-rays to find an enlarged liver and zero in on the cause. While I’ve forgotten her name, I do remember one visit rather well. Emilie was waiting to be seen, sitting on the edge of a cot in what pretty much looked, smelled and felt like a regular hospital. I noticed movement on the floor and glanced down to see, slithering between my feet, a black, spotted lizard, his tapered tail casually gliding over the toe of my right shoe.

It moved on, unperturbed by my presence and found its way behind a cabinet where he probably reduced the bug population, doing its part to keep the hospital clean. It was a measure of my adjustment to the not-Wellsville life that I was able to stand still, draw Rick’s attention to this splay-toed visitor, and then patiently wait for “our” doctor, a person in whom my faith continued.

Navigating the Kathmandu Airport or The Saga of Much Security and Many Stamps

An open letter to Jeff and Jen

Leave early for the airport. Bring aspirin. Breathe deep.

First, stand in line to get into the airport building. It’s slow progress because
1. There’s a crush of people.
2. Suitcases go through an x-ray machine with a warning sign: Caution – put no body parts inside this machine.
3. The suitcases are wrapped with a yellow security band before they are released.
4. Men are searched in the line and women are searched inside of a small curtained area. I’m not sure what I was searched for but I rarely put things in the places that were checked.
5. Everyone pushes.

So, you get inside and purchase a departure coupon at the bank. There are two lines – for nationals and foreigners. For us, the foreigners line was on the left and was much shorter but progress was slow. The charge to go to Delhi was 1365 and we didn’t have enough Rupees so had to combine payment in US dollars at an unfavorable exchange rate.

The coupon is actually a set of 4 coupons, perforated on one sheet. Periodically these will be stamped and torn and collected.

The next step is to go to the check-in line. Jet Air was on the far left of the terminal near where we jostled to enter the building. We stood in a line that we evaluated as moving at a snail’s pace. Little did we know.

The sign said that there could be only one carry on but when we were on the plane we saw people with up to four carry on cases so it’s an expansive “one”.

Finally we went upstairs where we stood for an hour without moving. None of the lines seemed to move. We stopped to fill in our embarkation forms and moved to the line but I recommend that you take a form to the line and work on it in line. It’ll give you something to do.

We stood and stood and talked and talked – with an American couple who had spent a lovely time in Nepal and looked forward to three weeks in India. I didn’t envy them the next three weeks.

We were standing behind 20 people at our boarding time so we jumped over to the diplomat line and begged. They sent us back. Other people jumped and went through so we returned to the diplomat line and with the help of another agent we were allowed to stay. Stickers were affixed to our passports and the boarding pass was stamped and I think the last bits of our departure tickets were collected so we were on our way. Except we weren’t.

There was another security check. The bags went through on the far left and people were checked on the right – separate areas for men and women again. We walked right down the center of the room to leave but were sent back to a row of tables for a visual check of our bags and stamps on both sides of our boarding passes.

We were not certain what people were looking at or for. We didn’t take our liquids out of our bags and nobody looked at my computer. Rick even came through with a bottle of water.

So, we went to the boarding area and we were on our way except that we weren’t.

Jet Air uses the second waiting room and the woman at the door said that it would be at least 30 minutes before boarding so I went into the restroom and came out to find all hell had broken loose. They announced boarding for flight 9w262. We were on flight 9w261.

Did Jet Air have two flights to Delhi at the same time? It didn’t seem right so I gently shoved forward (learned this in recent line experience) to ask and was told that the two numbers were the same flight. We went to the boarding bus.

Finally, we were going to be on the plane and out of lines – or not. At the bottom of the stairs was a little tent with one more security check of our bags and one more physical search of the men on the steps and of the women inside a curtained area.

The whole thing took 3 hours from the time we left our hotel for the 30 minute taxi ride until we sat on the plane. We were in a queue all of that time, never sat down and only made it to our plane because it was 15 minutes late and that’s with jumping into the diplomat’s line. When I filled out the evaluation for Jet Air I mentioned some of this though fatigue kept the comments short.

When you leave Kathmandu, you should consider giving yourself lots of time. May the 36 million gods of the Hindus smile on you and your luggage.

Namaste,
Elaine

PS: The Delhi airport isn’t much easier to deal with. They say that you can’t go in more than three hours before your flight and so offer space in a lounge for 30 Rupees for 3 hours, The lounge has a blaring TV set, a monitor for flight information, a couple of souvenir shops and some nasty chairs.

We sat chairs that were chained together in front of the chained emergency exit on a long glass wall. On the other side of the glass were dozens of people stretched out under or on blankets on the ground sleeping. Our entire 6 hour stay was punctuated with beeping horns. I honestly and without exaggeration don’t think that there were more than a few two-second pauses in the beeping the whole time.

There is a toilet downstairs that offers free urinals, 1 Rupee flush toilets and 2 Rupee baths. Rick offered me 3 Rupees if I would take a bath there and while I needed one I declined.

On the level with the lounge are other toilets. In the lady’s the attendant slept fitfully on a sheet of cardboard. She must have been exhausted and I wondered if she worked 2 or more jobs. As a bonus to travelers the toilets are free and have the comforts of home.

Two hours before our flight we dutifully began seeking our boarding area. Rick chased down a man in a Finn Air sweater when he came out of the men’s room and this man directed us to gate 3 but there were hundreds of people crowding the area so it was difficult to find where progress toward entry could be made.

Getting in took time and as with the Kathmandu airport we went through security and had our bags banded but didn’t thankfully need a departure coupon. If everyone in that airport had to stand in line for a departure ticket, planes would never take off.

Clutching boarding passes we went through customs and then through another security check where I was shunted off to a curtained area for my body search. If Rick hadn’t been there to pick up my computer and bag I don’t know what would have happened.

It took 2 hours to get inside, get the passes, go through customs and security and our flight was called to board while I was still in line to be searched.

All of which is to say, don’t expect an easy time in the Delhi airport and allow yourself 3 (miserable) hours.

Post PS
We made it to Helsinki, sat for hours and hours and boarded the plane but someone had a medical emergency and the plane took her to Iceland. The stop wasn't quick because of course they had to remove her luggage also.

The extra trip meant an extra 4 hours and we missed our connection to Rochester. Since Finn Air didn't have to take us further they didn't owe us anything and we have to sit around here for 12 hours to go home. As a bonus, our car parking will expire before we get to it so there is some chance it will be towed. Can you hear me scream?

Baktapur, Nepal

The city gate:


A bell clangs, a hundred bells clang and the sound bounces over and around the chugging engines, beeping horns, chanting monks, bargaining shoppers and endless drums and flutes. In the far distance the dying day glows pink on mountain snow and over the valley a huge flock of white birds settles then explodes again into the air looking for a night roost.

Red and pink shawls warm shoulders of women buying, women selling, women walking with children tied to their backs and everywhere there is another sound, another movement and another temple toward which the sounds are offered. This is Bhaktapur, Nepal, the city that holds its heritage.

We came here with Jeff, the last member of our India tour we hugged good-by. Rick and I had a room for our last night in Nepal but Jeff came only to walk about and have lunch before returning to Kathmandu. Shortly he’ll leave for Tibet and we will head for home.

Inside the taxi was one century but outside time was braided: ancient history, middle ages and modern times. We found internet cafes and pottery smoldering in straw fired pits. Tarps on streets or temple steps were covered with rice drying in the sun while people talked on cell phones. At noon a live goat led a parade to the main temple where it was sacrificed leaving a large puddle of blood on cobblestones – all of it captured on digital movie cameras. It’s, as I sometimes say, not Kansas.

Baktapur is the most impressive of the World Heritage sites we have seen during this trip. A large, complex entity, the city is a living museum with hundreds of temples and wells (there is little indoor water service) and more carvings than a person could count in a decade. The wooden doorways, windows, balconies and roof tops are carved with Ganish, elephants, goddesses unknown, Garuda, birds, feathers, fruits, diamonds and flowers.


The main square has all of this but Rick and I also walked the back alleys peeking in a doorway where a woman cooked over an open fire while surrounded by as many people as the small floor would hold. Hens pecked at stray grains of rice between their fluttering chicks. A young girl jumped rope in a courtyard and an old man slept on a bit of burlap next to knitting women and sleeping babies.

Everywhere there is one more structure worthy of a photograph.


Once just a bit of a trading road to Tibet what is now Bhaktapur became a town under the efforts of King Ananda Malla 1080, more or less. For 200 years, from 1400 onward it was the most powerful city in the area. Most of the knock-your-yak-wool-socks-off architecture is from that period or from the 17th century. Apparently it would be even more dramatic but an earthquake in 1934 destroyed many ornate temples. It’s hard to believe that any were lost since they are everywhere but at the peak there were 172 temples and monasteries here as well as 172 pilgrim shelters, now used as shaded meeting areas for old men during the day. (Though this one is stacked with pots not people.)


It seems as if there must be 172 stores selling CDs of monks chanting or of Nepali music because one hears this everywhere. Our guidebook says that this city, the architecture and pace, is what Kathmandu was 30 years ago. As I write we are sitting on the roof of our hotel sipping tea, listening to all that is Baktapur while I type on the laptop by the light of a candle sheltered from the wind by the middle part of a plastic one liter water bottle. Gotta love recycling.

In the 1970s a German consortium decided to support Baktapur by building a sewage system and repaving the streets with cobblestone and brick and also began a continuing restoration of buildings and temples. Now one pays $10 to enter and the money is used to restore old buildings brick by brick and clay tile by clay tile. Only photos will do to explain this town wide party with momo steamers (a sort of dumpling stuffed with veggies or chicken or buffalo) on every block.

Part 2

One never knows what one will find on any street but when on a street in a foreign city he chances of seeing something outlandishly different increases. Baktapura’s streets are as foreign as they come and they have provided us with shock, amusement and fascination.

A three-year old girl’s toy was the creepiest thing though I can only say that because we missed the goat sacrifice in the afternoon. She was running and laughing while waving about a hypodermic needle. (Let’s reassess the danger level of “runs with scissors”.)The needle was huge, the holding several ml of what looked like very dirty water (sewage??) and brandishing a 2 inch long needle. Rick and I cleared out of her way. Can you imagine being stabbed with an old hypodermic needle with unknown fluid inside?

Later another tiny girl ran between us with a burning stick. She was among a group of 3-10 year olds who were burning bits of trash in the corner of a temple.
Their "clay store" was a series of large mounds under tarps and lean-tos left in such a condition that intense wedging was required and so they were intensely wedging the black clay.





The pots dry in sunny potter's square and is pit fired to a red and is finished with paints or some kind of clear coating and is sold directly to tourists (ie the elephant vases)


but most of their work is of functional vessels traded for rice.
In a safer part of our evening walk we went to Potter’s Square. We had been there in the afternoon when we saw pots being stacked on a straw bed, packed with more straw and layered with more pots and more straw. By evening the pots were covered in straw and buried in ash in preparation for a 3-day firing.

Another load of pots had been fired and another was in the process of firing with smoke leaking out all around it. This pit firing was being tended by a man who fed scraps of wood into each of the ports at the bottom. He would continue to do this all night.

We went to our hotel room for the night when I heard cymbals and drums and looked out the window. There was a dancing parade of the nine manifestations of Durga, living gods that are particularly revered and feared in Baktapura. During certain few occasions and particularly during the festival of Dasain (now), members of the cast of flower sellers are chosen to don the masks and parade through the street.

The masks are specially made and used for only one year. When on, the masks empower the wearer with the embodiment of the deity and so they are living gods. They dance throughout the city to of the major temples and then they disappear into the monastery where only they and initiates can go. I wanted a photo but was told that someone might smash my camera and beat me for photographing a living god so it's good that they ran inside a gate and that I didn't follow trying for a good shot but, again I ask, where do these ideas come from?

Part 3

Through the COLD night there were periodic bells clanging but the bells began in earnest at 4:30 and were ferocious for a while being joined by blaring horns and the occasional fire cracker. Dressed in every layer we had we ventured out, creeping down the stairs intending to go to the square for a closer look but the night clerk slept under a thick blanket in the lobby and the doors were closed and bared. We were locked in but in isn’t really the right word.


The hotel rooms are closed but the restaurant is in the open courtyard and the stairs lead to the roof-top café so the building is more open (cold) air than enclosed but without leaping over the outer walls or waking the guy on the sofa we were locked in.

Jen Brown, a new friend from the India tour, leaves today for base camp at Everest. We’re chilled to the bone here and can’t imagine what she will face. Rick particularly is feeling awful today, so awful he finds nothing of interest in the streets.

getting to Kathmandu

Kathmandu

We had a decent bus for the trip from Pokhara though we started by backtracking over the rutted road that rattled our brains two days earlier. We passed the land slide with chunks of mud like small huts and over the same shaky single-lane bridge. There is only this one road to Pokhara. Monika began to get nauseous so when we stopped for tea she went to the front seat. Why not? There was room for three people and one was empty and it would be easier on her if she sat up front.

She called to me to look out the window because a man was riding a motorcycle with chickens tied to it. The guy had 30 very unhappy chickens hanging by their feet from the luggage rack and handlebars. And we thought our transportation was lacking.

We drove for a few hours eventually reaching a better road so Monika asked if we could stop for a potty break. We did but I want to say that I used the world’s highest toilet in Peru and now possibly the world’s dirtiest toilet here in Nepal. Happily we stayed at the stop to stretch our legs a bit and so photographed some of those great Nepali trucks as they drove by. The backs of the trucks have messages such as: push horn, horn please, honk please, please honk, see you and on the rare occasion one is decorated with heart love. The fronts are all flowers and vines and tinsel garlands. Very cool.







I just couldn't stop taking photos of these trucks





so I continued to snap through that break.





Monika wanted to get back in the front seat but Brahm told her that he had to do some work and needed space and she should sit in the back seat. She didn’t want to make a fuss so she went in the bumpy back.

We passed an industrial area with brick making and with large scale poultry barns and then the air became dust mixed with diesel fumes and I knew we were getting near Kathmandu.

Work was being done to construct a wider road but for now, loads of stone and sand restrict passage so that our movement was measured in dusty feet per minute.

Kathmandu

Words escape me still but I’ll work on describing it. Perhaps I could just say it’s busy and crowded and as old as Buddha. We’ve traded cows and goats for monkeys. It’s more like Delhi than any where else except that people smile and remove trash here.

Our arrival was on Friday and while Friday is Pie Day in Alfred it is Party Hearty in Kathmandu. Near our hotel live bands played with ear-splitting exuberance from 2 am till after the roosters began to crow. It was louder in our room than we could bear and the band wasn’t anywhere near us so I there might not have been a way to measure the decibel level at ground zero. It was a miserable night.

Looking back

We like Kathmandu more than India. When we walked to a restaurant Sunday morning people swept the street and when we passed by later the trash was gone. It was, we later learned, spread out on a larger street for recycling, of sorts. People picked through it to find cardboard and useful things. Maybe it will be taken away later. There were no piles when we arrived so there must be some kind of system.

There are traffic lights and cross walks. There are sidewalks and few places that smell of urine.


In the old city, there is mass traffic and massive confusion but in the new part of the city there is order. We walked past the king’s palace and saw the royal carriage pulled by huge horses and guarded by soldiers. Our only major adventure was the monkey temple.


The monkey temple isn’t about monkeys but somehow they live there. Hundreds of aggressive furry families that mill about stealing food from people’s hands and messing with the offerings.

This man sat outside of the temple and patiently used his hands and feet to unweave this plastic sack and then wove the bits of plastic thread into rope.

There is a huge tree near the top and it wears more prayer flags than we have previously seen in one place. There are people praying and spinning prayer wheels, lighting candles and selling flowers, making offerings and asking visitors to buy their carvings. We didn’t stay very long.

Later we visited the Yak and Yeti, a famous old hotel built in part using an old palace. The room rate online is $86 per night including breakfast so we thought we could afford a pleasant dinner there. Dinner was closer to $86 per person so quite out of our budge but we did walk through the upscale shops and accepted the salute of the doorman.

In general, we may have had enough chaos, confusion, clutter and noise and might be ready for home.

Kathmandu post script

Our few days in Kathmandu left us impressed with the cleanliness of the city when compared with Delhi or Varanasi. We noticed a couple of large piles of trash around dumpsters but people were picking through it and we thought that it was some kind of recycling effort. While visiting with people in a non-moving custom’s line at the airport we learned that Kathmandu’s garbage collectors have been on strike for a week. Color us surprised.

Departmental Obsersvations

Departmental Observations

On the main tourist road in Pokhara, Nepal, there are 2 departmental stores. We went inside one looking for snacks.

The doorway is lined with bottles of water and stacks of big, soft rolls of toilet paper. After our time in India, such a display is as appealing as the Hope Diamond would be in a jewelry store.

The second aisle offered snacks: a hundred brands and flavors of chocolate including M&Ms and Cadbury lots of European dark chocolates but also prepackaged bags of nuts and trail mix.

Nuts sounded good so I picked up a couple of packs of almonds and cashews. Hey, they were packaged in nice, sanitary, plastic bags. Wasn’t that great? I carried them around the store and looked at a huge display of scissors, soaps, teas, socks, paper and more cookies than a town full of trekkers could dunk in morning tea.

Then I found two men sitting on the floor in the back. One reached into a large sack of cashews and measured the nuts on a scale. When he had the right amount, he picked up a bag and poured them in. He handed the bag to the other man who held the edges of the bag in a candle flame to seal it thereby creating the sanitary packages of nuts stacked so nicely by the chocolate bars.

I returned nuts to the nice sanitary display.

Annapurna Mountains

In the Annapurna Mountains

It seems days ago now but at 4 this morning a knock at the door set us in motion to view the sunrise on the top of a hill overlooking the valley town of Pokhara. We almost didn’t make it up because the car in front of our van had a problem. People gathered around it and pushed it up the hill until the engine caught but it went only a few feet and stalled again. Another group gathered around and pushed and again it faltered so they pushed it to the side of the road so our van and others could labor to the top.

We found coffee shops and souvenir stands and a flood of pink sunlight crawling up from the other side of the distant hills. There were many tourists there taking photos of the sunrise, the mountain tops and themselves. When the red ball broke over the hill there was a combination of frenzied shutter action, applause and prayer to the sun god – a mini festival.

We returned to the hotel to regroup for breakfast and then to hire taxis to the dam where we crossed a swaying wooden foot bridge and began what Amanda timed as a one hour hike but I’m sure her watch stopped for at least 50 minutes because I did 2 hours worth of puffing and sweating.

The taxi driver actually insisted that we not take this walk. It was a long walk and “not good.” He couldn’t define “not good” so we went. It wasn’t good in that it was mostly in the woods and so the view was limited but we did peek through the trees at the lake and the mountains and we passed a couple of snack stands and found an observation point fairly covered with prayer flags. It was wild, crazy prayer flaggage. The workout was good for us after so many long hours of bus bouncing.

We found our way with the help of a young man who came along on the trail because at first we weren’t sure about how to go but there were actually signs (Who could expect such a thing?) and we would have been fine but it was all good, share the wealth and all. We walked a long time without being able to see the stupa so his presence was good security.

Early in the walk we passed people working in the rice fields. Water buffalo tramped in a circle over rice to loosen the grains and then men beat the rice on the ground to remove the grain. Nearby a group of women cooked what was most likely a hard earned meal and together they painted a lovely scene under the huge blue sky.

Not far from the rice fields, Amy decided she was too ill for a hike so she and Gordon walked back. They got a closer look at the rice work in the field and decided to take a walk in the river where women were washing clothes. This ended with their paying the women for foot massages and then taking a taxi back to the hotel

The point of the hike was the World Peace Pagoda created by a Japanese group some time ago. The Pagoda was closed for renovation. No problem. It was a nice walk through the woods followed by a direct walk down steps to the lake where we hired two boats to take us back to the hotel.

One boat came with a boatman but Rob was handed a paddle and pronounced driver of the other so he and Jeff had to pay for a boat ride and then do the work themselves (and us). It’s like that sometimes and it’s all okay in Nepal.

Pokhara, Nepal

Pokhara

Sorry, the internet is so slow I still can't post photos but I have about 500 of them.

Our group’s numerous demands and not inconsiderable whining brought us a larger, newer, cleaner bus which made both a potty stop and a food stop (at a restaurant with many toilets – one of them western style).

We traveled from Chitwan to Pukhara on a road built in 1973. Before the road this particular trip was a ten-day mule train trek. For us it was a 5 hour drive that involved as much bouncing as a ten-day mule train trek.

I’m pleased that the road is there – all 220 km of it – but the sad little road suffers from pot holes like craters and the occasional rock or mud slide damage that creates a great deal of unevenness so that travel is slow, halting, and amazingly bouncy. We spent the whole trip listening to Nepalese or Indian rock music which was okay at first but seemed to grow in volume toward the last hour until our heads were raw from the piercing sounds of thin, high pitched women’s voices.

This bus ride started with a bit of excitement – we chased a run-away horse. We were leaving the village and had just crossed the bridge when Rick pointed out a little horse cart with a cute cover. He called it the “surrey with the fringe on top” but suddenly said surrey took off without a driver.

Amy saw the driver panic and run and Amanda watched the cart speed away. The man smacked on the side of the van and though not a word was spoken the driver realized that he was being commandeered as a rescue vehicle so he slowed the van, the man jumped onto the ladder at the rear and we were in pursuit.

We drove for quite a while and I thought that the pony must have turned somewhere. I watched the man through the back window as he glanced up side roads and driveways but always returned to the forward view with extreme concern and distress.

We must have gone the better part of a mile when we saw the pony stopped on the road. A crowd gathered much like one did when our bus locked together with a pink car in some other town on a previous endless bus ride.

That accident was on a busy street full of cars, bikes, motorcycles, people and all kinds of animals so it was no surprise that there were suddenly enough people to lift the car and pull the vehicles apart but this was a relatively quiet street suddenly full of people ready to help. Where did they come from?

The horse stood in that particular place not because he had been caught and not because he was satisfied with that much freedom but because he ran over top of a westerner’s motorcycle which was then lodged between horse and cart. (It is unknown if the motorcycle was moving or not at the time of impact. The westerner was wearing gloves and helmet so it seems likely that he was riding but we missed the moment of impact.)

The crowd assessed the situation and the motorcyclist held the horse with a “what-the-hell-happened?” look on his face. Thankfully he seemed unharmed.

The horse’s owner jumped from the still moving bus and ran to the fray but it seemed the crowd was in process of detaching the cart so he held the horse as they lifted it from the motorcycle.

A bicyclist went down the street to tell everyone what the problem was. When he came to our bus driver there was a short conversation which must have included the driver reporting his part in the rescue. Smiles were exchanged and the bike rider went on. Everyone was quite patient.

The motorcyclist seemed okay as did the horse. The horse owner kept a tight hold on his animal. People moved the cart to the other side of the street out of the way so that the horse could be hitched to his cart again. The crowd picked up the motorcycle for the smiling rider who, when last I saw him through the back window, was putting his gloves back on and shaking his head.

The rest of our trip was relatively free of drama though the road seemed hardly wide enough for two buses to pass unscathed and it was occasionally nerve wracking. We drove past fields patch-worked in rice harvested and rice cut and drying. We crossed the river a few times once on a one lane bridge so creaky and rattlely that it seemed ready to collapse.

Right along side of the creaky bridge was another bridge under construction so maybe the old bridge will shortly be removed. On this day, only one vehicle crossed that bridge at a time which I thought was perfectly dandy but there didn’t seem to be any signs telling people to do that. How does everyone figure this stuff out?

We often had views of snow-capped mountains, lovely green valleys and winding rivers all watched by people with room to wiggle.

In Pokhara Rick and I walked the town and found an observation platform on the lake where we watched a pink sunset. Rick keeps thinking he is in Peru with pizza restaurants, cold air at night, fires burning in the restaurants and colorful knitted socks, mittens and hats for sale but we are certainly in Nepal where the eye of Buddha is on shirts, buildings, trucks and signs.

Again, the people seem friendly and happy. They interact with their children and greet without pushing one to buy, buy, buy. Also, we are all finding great joy not only in walking on sidewalks but in walking where there are no cow droppings to navigate.

Nepal, the antidote to India

I moved a comforter on a shelf and a lizard hopped off slithering under the cupboard. Welcome to Nepal where lizards patrol the ceiling, monkeys scramble in trees and elephants stop by the restaurant for potatoes.

Rick and I enjoy geckos and look forward to finding them on our walls but when one jumps out from a blanket that’s a different thing. Even so this is by far the nicest place we have stayed.

Called the Sapana Lodge, it is operated by Dhura Giri, the general manager, the person who has calmed our life, fed us well, given us a comfortable room and arranged for us to visit a local village, the source of our eggs, bread and vegetables and the place where Sapana Lodge will establish a medical clinic and school.

It’s been a wonderful day in Nepal, a country I can heartily recommend as a marvelous destination. This morning we rode a jeep to the Rapti River and boarded dugout canoes for a trip down the river looking for crocodiles, birds and rhinos and then hiked back. We saw 2 crocs sunning on a bank, birds everywhere, a monkey in a tree and the very coolest of red bugs, a cotton bug. Wonderful.

The river was dressed in mist so it seemed we must fall off the end of the earth. The water constantly gurgled over in swirling eddies while bird calls filled the air.

It was so tranquil and quiet that the stress of India fell into the water melting away.

After almost an hour we reached an area where our heavy western butts pushed the canoe into the stone river bottom so the boatman brought the boat to the bank to let us out. The bank was velvet soft sand undercut by the current in this area so before everyone was out of the canoe a huge chunk of land broke loose and smashed into the water and canoe sending one chair tumbling, nearly rocking Gordon overboard and splashing me with mud. Could have been worse.

The return trip was a jungle walk and those start with safety lessons. If a bear finds us come together in a group and make noise. For a tiger, make eye contact and walk backwards. If it’s a rhino climb a tree or hide behind a tree or run in a zigzag pattern while tossing a piece of clothing to distract it.

Coming down our narrow path was a mahout on his elephant. We all pushed into the plants along the path to make way and suddenly realized that her baby walked behind. They were out looking for elephant grass, a disappearing plant.

It seems that 9 years ago someone brought a vine from Africa and it is now going wild here. A true invasive plant, it grows over the elephant grass, the shrubs, the trees and everything else killing the native plants and removing habitat and food as it grows. Nothing eats it; nothing kills it. The people call it minute mile – because of its rapid growth.

After lunch most of the group went off for an elephant ride but Rick and I walked to town where we found everyone was incredibly pleasant. Children visited with us and this crazy guy asked us to take his photo. Shop keepers didn’t beg us to buy and carried on long conversations with us about where we live and what grows in our home.

The street had no roaming cows, no beeping horns, no tuktuks, no begging rickshaw drivers – only two bull carts, a collection of bike riders and many pedestrians most of whom smiled to say Nameste. By the time we were half way to the river we were waving and saying Nameste to everyone. Very cool.

We went to a store with fair trade items made by women’s collectives and a leprosy camp. The owner was very pleasant and proud of what he had to offer and how the art work was original and how fair prices went to his clients. Nepal is not India.

Our third big event was a visit to the Tharu village nearby. It was a bit of a mess because today is a festival in honor of Shiva. People come from about a 15 km radius to pray at Shiva’s temple and then gamble, eat, shop and visit. It’s a special day for the young girls to dress in their best clothes and meet young men from neighboring areas. The girls were gorgeous but the traffic was worse than in Delhi.

We had to cross a narrow bridge, a narrow bridge completely filled with people and bikes. The jeep drove slowly through the crowd that flowed around it almost like the river moved around our canoe. At one point a car came from the other direction but we made it then another jeep came. There wasn’t more than an inch clearance between the two. Wow.

We visited a house with a bio gas system. The put water buffalo dung into a vat and mix it with water. This goes into an underground storage tank and gives off methane. The methane is captured and piped into the house where plastic tubes take it to burners for cooking. It must seem like heaven to the woman there because she no longer has to search for fire wood. It also means less smoke in the house. Slick.

The houses by the way are mainly built of elephant grass covered on both sides with a mixture of buffalo dung and mud which dries into a hard coating. The floor is made of grass mats covered in buffalo dung and mud and it is hard enough to walk on and smooth enough to sweep. Just now homes have gotten a fresh coating of dung and mud to make them clean and they have been painted with handprints, prints of the foot of god and flowers. The paintings are there to invite the god of wealth to enter and bless the family.

The paintings are particularly concentrated around the doors to make certain the gods know where to enter. It’s a type of competition because the gods only go into the most inviting homes.

We went into a small house with only two rooms with most of the space filled with sacks and baskets of rice. The harvest we have seen across India is the same as in Nepal. It’s the rice for the family for the next year.

If they don’t thresh all the rice now they pack it into cylindrical stacks outside their doors and collect the rest of the rice later. The rice straw is animal food and is also used to make a sort of beer.

Near the homes are gardens for vegetables, darting chickens, goats, cows and bulls. Cows for milk and work and bulls for work.

One man was ripening bananas. He buried bananas under some loose dirt and then had on one side of the dirt pile an opening where he placed some rice straw. When we were there he lit the rice straw to get a smoldering fire and then covered the fire with more dirt. The smoke would surround the bananas and make them ripe in two days.

A woman held a curved knife with her foot while she sliced julienne potatoes as quick and even as any chef on Food TV and another woman showed us her tattoos. Women must have tattooed right arms before they are allowed to cook and serve food. Their arms must be beautiful when they had food to guests. Where do traditions originate?

Everywhere children played and people talked and laughed. Nepal is so not India.

Some of the houses were brick and some, mud or brick, had electricity. Many had water pumps but NONE had toilets. Washing is done in the river and squatting is done in the field between the village and the river. The central government provides nothing here. Even the roads and bridges are locally built.

This hotel was financed by a Dutch NGO in an effort to change things. They hired Dhurba Giri because he was born here and knows all the people but has business knowledge and is dedicated to using hotel resources to help the village.

Hotel furniture was made locally and the hotel buys food from villagers. There are nine workers living here and every one of them speaks English well and is skilled and organized. (I so missed organization in India.) The hotel opened only 2 months ago so this is the start but when it becomes profitable the money will be used for the local people.

As the perfect ending, two little lizards are now scuttling up the yellow wall with little, round, sticky feet so I will choose to believe one is the creature who startled me this morning and survived his fall and will eat mosquitoes all night.

Leaving India, the hard way

Sunday and the end of India for us

It’s amazing how loud an Asian phone can be at 4 in the morning. Eyelids snap open so harshly that eyeballs pop out as if on springs. Awake we were and as stunned as if whacked upside the head with a cricket bat. So began our last day in India.

The bus arrived at 3 am though we were scheduled to depart at 5. Something upset the driver so he took off in a huff and we sat on the bus for almost an hour waiting for him to come back. Brahm made several phone calls during the time but when we asked him what was happening he only said, “No problem.”

That’s the universal answer around here, “No problem.”

Obviously there was a problem but while we waited we discovered that the bus is home to a mouse. I say a mouse because we saw one at a time but a lone mouse seems unlikely. Some drumming and clanging distracted us from the mouse. People were chanting and marching to the river for sunrise. We rode to the river for the festival night and it took 30 minutes to drive so those people would be lucky to get there for Monday’s sunrise.

Varanasi is on the Ganges River (Ganga). Every Hindu is supposed to bathe in the river but if they can’t actually go to the river, they can go to some temples with specially shaped arches which represent the river. Passing under the arches substitutes for the trip itself. When they die though their ashes must go into the river, a body of water seen as holy to drink and bathe in though swirling though the water are grandpa’s remains.

Hindus believe that they make no choices. Hindu gods (all 326 million of them) decide all matters so that people only endure. That’s the perfect attitude to teach people if you want to control them and use them and that’s the religious/superstitious/cultural package in this part of the world. As always, geography determines one’s take on god.

Two of the 326 million gods are the river and the sun or they live in the river and the sun. I’m not sure. The holiday honoring both of them is Chhath and we were there in time to see it celebrated.

The Hindus of Vananasi go to the river to celebrate sunrise every morning but on Chhath tens of thousands go and tens of thousands more go to other rivers. They bathe there and brush their teeth. They dip or splash their sons to give them long lives (daughters are on their own) and they put candles in little dishes with flowers in them and add to the pollution of the river.

At any rate, the bus did get underway in the morning but only went about 10 minutes with 75 horn beeps when we stopped for gas.

Have you ever been on a bus and stopped to buy gas? Apparently it’s not odd here because another bus was at the pumps too. We hoped the mouse would hop off while we were there.

Rick kept saying he was one with the…
One with the bus
One with the mouse
One with the horn
One with the music
One with the sauntering cows
Ohmmmmmm

In a way the bus was good because we each had two seats and could stretch out but in a way the bus was bad because there was no air conditioning and some windows wouldn’t open. The bus had no toilet but it was clean, ignoring the mouse.

I planned to work on my photos during the ride but it was so bumpy and jittery that it would have destroyed the hard drive to ask it to work under those conditions. Likewise I couldn’t read or write or even work on Suduko. It wasn’t possible to write legible numerals in the boxes. One spot on the road was so lumpy that if it was a river it would be white water or if it was a ski slope it would be serious washboard.

We often rolled along at a good rate but sometimes were slow enough that children could run along side and beg for food and pens. The 8 hour drive took 12 hours and it wasn’t a lot of fun though most of the people we passed probably thought we were living the good life.

The bus hit a small purple car and the two vehicles locked together. There was a lot of loud conversation and then a bunch of men picked up the car and jiggled it free of the bus and the bus moved down the road. While some people thought we had gotten away easily I reserved judgment and sure enough we stopped at the next wide area in the road. The car’s driver stormed over and all kinds of people were yelling and stomping and pointing and then they all left and we drove onward.

We stopped once tea and toilet though Rick and I declined the tea which had milk. The next toilet stop was at a brick wall. The gentlemen calmly waited while the ladies squatted in the grass providing entertainment to the Indian women walking across the fields with bundles of straw on their heads. Criminey.
When the men took their turn to pee, the women were uninterested. Indeed, I am surprised when a man with his back to the road is not peeing and I assume every puddle is urine.

Dinner was of slight servings but tasty and Rick took his drippy noise to bed. Up at 5:30 tomorrow but I’m ready for that phone.

Varanasi, India

Thursday/Friday
Sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things” – sort of
Clanking of train wheels and tooting of loud horns
Sellers of chai tea and people of loud snore
Bare toes that wiggle under white crispy sheets
These are a few of the things best to ignore.
When the flies bite
When the sanitizer stings
When I’m feeling bad
I simply ignore all these things in my space
And then I don’t feel so sad

Yep, we spent the night on a sleeper train clanking our way over the Indian rails to travel from Orchha to Varanasi. The night on the sleeper train was a much-dreaded component of this Gap tour but it simply wasn’t as bad as my raw throat and dizziness.

It’s winter here so instead of reaching 48 degrees in the afternoon the temperature merely ambles toward 30 or so and that passes for “cold” here. The point is that since it’s winter the fans weren’t turned on. From my slot on the top bunk, I looked longingly at the aluminum blades wishing they would move the air but seeing the Indians mummy-like in woolen blankets, heads buried to conserve heat, it was senseless to ask.

Let me describe the train. The length of the car on one side has triple bunks where the middle berth folded down to become the back of the bench and created seating for three when folded or sleeping for 3 when deployed. On the other side of the train there are only two. The bottom berth becomes two seats or one berth. (I’ll try to get photos posted.)

During the night, the train seemed to move about 10 minutes and stop for 5. While it moved the snoring was masked by the many train noises. When the train stopped it was as if the snoring went through a clarifying filter sharpening the edge of each sound to increase the fingernails on chalkboard sensation.

I hesitate to speak of dinner last night but it was, again, part of the experience, an experience that moves between fascination and “totally bummed out.”

Treat Restaurant occupied one side of a large building while the other side had some kind of children’s restaurant or play area whose main purpose was to provide music loud enough to cause brain damage. Shortly after we ordered the music stopped inducing in me an enormous gratitude.

We ordered and I glanced to my left, toward the kitchen, to see a rat scamper across the floor and scoot under a cabinet.

I was sitting across from a pale, sad Jen tightly wrapped in her shawl. We talked earlier while she recharged her Blackberry and she told me she thought herself adventurous before this trip began but is now reassessing. I hoped she hadn’t seen the rat.

I guessed she would either stare open-mouthed and silent in an over-load condition or scream insistently but her eyes were closed putting me in a moral dilemma. Should I tell her or be silent? I chose silence and instead gave deep thought on my own situation. Would I eat the meal we just ordered?

Certainly we had seen rats throughout Asia and in some Hindu temples the people share food with rats and consider that to be a blessing. I can live without such a blessing.

The train station was like others but since it was night it didn’t smell so bad. We settled in and rode for about 12 hours. When we arrived in Varanasi, a group of porters fought over who would carry Jen’s bag to the tuktuk and finally the tour leader took her bag and walked away. We tuktuked through staggering traffic to arrive at the hotel where our rooms were not ready.

When we finally checked in, the room looked nice but for the cockroaches on the walls in the bathroom. At least traffic sounds don’t penetrate into our sleeping area much at all.

There was a wasted hour during which we assembled as directed to go on our walking tour orientation to the city but that’s not what we got. We were told to pay the tuktuk drivers money and they would take us to a temple in the next village. We had been on a train for most of the previous 24 hours and then in a tuktuk from the train station so going another 20 km in another tuktuk didn’t sound great.

There was more conversation and an exchange of ideas and then the group split into shoppers and explorers and walkers. We were the only walkers. We just headed down the road and saw a Hindi wedding and browsed in shops finding spice alley and metal work factories. I took enough photos to fill the memory card.

There have been a lot of wasted hours with people being late or having misunderstandings or because Brahm, our tour leader, gave incomplete information or because he spends forever haggling or because he simply isn’t very organized. Others say that GAP tours are generally better organized with more involved guides.

Rick and I walked the streets of Varnasi for a couple of hours. The city is a mass of humanity, all driving or walking or riding bikes on a single street at one time. The street is clogged with cows, piles of trash, goo, spit and urine. If there is a corner, there is a man peeing in it. If there is not a corner, likely a man will pee just the same.

Bells ring, horns blast or beep or squawk and flies fill the spaces between all. (I exaggerate marginally.)

We have in our group three Jens. Tall blonde Jen is sick and not interested in being sick here so is going home. She is getting to the airport by air conditioned car and saying farewell to the tuktuk experience.

There is also not-tall blonde Jen, called Jenny at times, who is always, always laughing and smiling. Third is dark-haired mysterious Jen, adventure woman. Dark haired Jen is the Jen involved in the “my tea leaves have legs” incident in Agra. She has been traveling for months and will go home around Christmas.

Jen and I joked about being able to eat bits of things in our food as long as they had no legs but then I sat across from her at dinner and she delicately picked a bit from her dal. When placed on her bread plate, out of the way, I saw tiny legs sticking up – a cockroach escaped from a bathroom perhaps. She just smiled and ate the dal. Gotta admire the pluck.

Saturday started early with a trip to the Ganges for morning festival. This is the festival to the sun god who will give “sons” long life if he is kept happy. Every morning many people go to the river to bathe and brush their teeth and wash clothes but on festival morning there are a few thousand extras. We went in a huge row boat to view a long stretch of river.

Rick expected the Ganges to be a astench-pit but it wasn’t though it would take great effort to clear it up enough to someday call it murky. We took about 200 photos. Again, to be posted when possible.

(Jen, I know that you will read this so please forgive me for the rat story. Take care and best to you in the land of first class service. Elaine)

India

First night, early A.M. Friday

We’re in India. I say that with some pleasure and some fear. We were met at the airport by Krishna from the hotel. When we walked out to find the car, we passed some amazingly dusty motorcycles and Rick said they must have been parked there along while. I didn’t think so because I could see the dust in the air. It was effort to pump the air, laced with dust, urine, smoke and diesel fumes, through to filter out some oxygen.

It was a long ride to the hotel. The road was dismal – lumpy, dusty, rough, clogged with cars, trucks and buses. We came into a busy and rather scruffy part of the city to find out hotel finally getting into our room after 1 am. As Krishna showed us where things were, the cockroaches crawled over the desk and vanity.

We tried to get Internet to say we had arrived but it didn’t work so I went to the lobby to use the public computer. The night clerk was asleep on the sofa but a group of men worked to scrape the wood paneling to refinish it. I used the computer and returned to the room where Rick and I listened, sleepless, through a night of cars beeping, the phone ringing in the hall and then the morning call to prayer before one could really enjoy morning.

Friday evening, end of first full day

The horns beep outside the window non-stop but that masks the noise created by the pigeon living in our air conditioner. Periodically the phone in the hall rings and then there is the emphatic burst of fire crackers. It is the night of Diwali or Deepawali, the Hindu festival of lights. Like Christmas, it has become commercialized. Where once small packets of sweets or fruit were exchanged people now give more lavish gifts and businesses expect sales to swell in the weeks before Diwali.

It is not like Chinese New Year because businesses remain open and taxis still move. It is similar in the constant fire crackers exploding in the street outside our windows on the evening of our first day in New Delhi.

We spent most of the day with Surinder who took us to the Gurudawara Bangle Shaib Sikh temple where there was a free clinic and hospital and food is free to everyone every day and the buildings are created by volunteers and they don’t ask for donations but some people give them. This is Diwali, the last day of the Hindu year, so it was particularly busy and colorful with all the candles put out.

Surinder said he would take us some places and show us things but what he really wanted was for us to buy something and we didn’t. The rugs are beautiful but we bought a beautiful carpet in Hong Kong and they shipped us something else. Luckily we liked it a lot but it just ruins the sense of trust one can have over that we will ship this to you sales line.

I am marginally interested in a Punjabi dress but not for $300 or even for $65. I would wear it just a few times. Also, the number of colors and sparkly things is somewhat past what I can wear at one time. Surinder and the people in the shops said that I should have jewelry just for the pleasure of owning it but I didn’t agree and they didn’t understand. We spent way more time with Surinder than we expected to and we paid him twice what he originally asked for but less than what he wanted.

We drove past government buildings, Nehru’s museum and planetarium as well as a monument to Gandhi and a singularly unattractive Buddhist temple.

After lunch where we shared a table with two Swedish woman and had a great meal of Tandori chicken and masala and garlic tandori bread and then stopped at two more places where we didn’t buy anything but saw beautiful carpets and two of the most ornate and ugliest chairs ever to be fashioned of silver swans we returned to the hotel where we fell asleep.

We were able to rouse ourselves and we went to the roof to look out over things and decide if we could actually manage to go out into the night, the pollution and the fireworks of Diwali. We got our bearings from a map in the hotel and walked to find the market street. It was really near the end of its day but we passed a hotel with a drum circle and several hundred sparkling things. We stayed a while and just after Rick said we should go several ear-splitting fire crackers were tossed into the mix. Good timing.

We walked the streets looking at this and that. I found some $4 Punjabi dresses but would really like to find something a bit better than that. We didn’t walk down any dark alleys but we were surprised by a spark-spitting fire cracker that came from a group of boys and skittered across the road, between our feet and under a car. Back in the hotel, the fireworks batter our windows and the noise of street party has no indication that it will stop before day’s end.

I have, however, ignored cultural guidelines and killed a few cockroaches. When I found one on the bed, it was easy and with the first transgression over, it was short work to get the few that would have prowled about the computer as I typed.

Just now the firecrackers are so furious it sounds like hail beating on a tin roof and goes on and with occasional rockets. The pigeon in the air conditioner sounds restless and I do hope he won’t find a way in. Guess I will try to sleep and feel comfortable in this different city as I look forward to tomorrow.

End of Saturday
The fire works last night went on steadily - faster than I could count - from 8 pm till about 1 am and then slowed down. I expected the streets to be knee deep in burned papers but there's hardly a hint though the paper blames smog on the combination of cool winter weather (it’s 70 something) and no winds.

There were, over the weekend, 220 fires in Delhi and 48 of them were attributed to “crackers”. Apparently people fire them from their roofs. Considering the precarious situation of crowded living and the rat’s nests of wires, it’s a wonder the great Chicago fire episode doesn’t repeat here annually.

We started the day with a car and driver and went toward some of the sights. We stopped along the way to take photos of the changing of the guard – horsemen – at the president’s home.

We went to Alai Minar and Outb Minar which is a burial ground for Mogals. The Outb Minar is the tallest stone tower in India. Built in the 12th century and repaired now and then after lighting strikes it stands 72.5 meters tall. It is covered in ornate stone and is quite striking.

A second stone tower was begun in 1311 and was intended to be twice the size but was never completed. The base is of mortared rubble and was to be covered by finer material but construction stopped when the ruler of the time died. It is amazing to me that this rough material stands still after 700 years. It was meant to be covered in something stronger and more finished so there wasn’t much concern over the durability of the material but it’s still there and used by many for photo back drops.

The driver took us to his friend to look at carpets. We said we didn’t want to go in but he more or less begged us so in we went. The carpets were gorgeous. One was a life time carpet which is that the craftsman gets far enough ahead that he can spend a year making a fine silk rug of great complexity, making his loom unavailable for an extended period and not taking in money over that time. It was 3 x 5 and ornate and gorgeous but at $2400 not in our budget though it was a bargain at the price.

We then went on to Humayuns Tomb, a World Heritage site. At first we weren’t impressed but then realized that we weren’t in the right place. Once we found the tomb we understood why people were so impressed with it. The tomb is the inspiration for the Taj Mahal which I hope we’ll get to see.

Our next stop was to be the Red Fort but when we got there the queue for entry snaked back on itself and held hundreds of people. We went back to the rickshaw driver (the car driver had to stop at a point and we had to go by rickshaw the rest of the way) but he actually found us heading back (how can they always find us in a sea of tourists?) and asked what was wrong. He offered to show us around old Delhi so we figured we were in the area and said yes.

It was great. I have some wonderful photos – the barber shop, the wild wiring system, fruits, crackers and breads. Old Delhi hides behind the main roads in a wild warren of winding narrow roads from which we would never have emerged without our trusty guide.

We went back to the hotel and walked around Market Street and then went to meet our tour group with whom we went into the city. First we walked to the Metro and the guide bought tokens for us. The tokes are blue plastic, about the size of a swollen quarter and somehow encoded for the amount of money paid. We had to go several stops and transfer so he paid about 20 Rupees for each.

The Metro arrived impressively full and so all 16 of us and several dozen other people crowded on. At the next stop more added to the crush and at the next stop more. We all seemed to get off at the same stop to transfer to another line.
We looked at India gate and then walked to a bus stop. When the bus arrived it was packed. I mean it. Limbs were sticking out the doors but about 30 people at the stop got on and the bus spit some soot and left us.

Several minutes later another bus arrived and it wasn’t nearly as full so we got on with all the other locals who had amassed during the wait. We hung on to this and that and rocked and nearly fell as the bus sped over bumps and around curves. This driver was in a hurry and he had no mercy.

We got off downtown near a Metro that would take us back and the tour guide just sort of left us there. He said we’d find restaurants everywhere but we didn’t. Some people ate at a touristy-sort-of restaurant and the rest went wherever. We thought it was unprofessional to dump us like that. It seemed he should know restaurants.

Rick and I took the Metro back toward the hotel after rejecting McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. After making the wrong turn we got straightened around and found our hotel’s neighborhood and a restaurant with good garlic nan. We had eaten breakfast at 8 and dinner at 7 and that was a long stretch for our bellies though the people living under the Metro might have thought it a heavenly day.


On Sunday we were up at 4, out by 5 and rolling on a train to Jaipur by 6. The trip started with vans – 5 people inside and suitcases precariously piled on top. It was a race for the train station weaving through traffic, over bumps, around bikes and people and over more bumps. I watched the back the whole way looking for flying luggage.

The train station. If you are picturing some quaint little place full of signs and advertisements for candy bars and beer you are wrong. The parking lot was packed tighter than the public buses. We had to drag our suitcases through crowds and beggars and various unidentified puddles of noticeable odor across the parking lot and over several foot-high curbs to get inside the building where thousands stood or sat on the floor, their many voices blending into a lilting melody woven through with train whistles and screeching brakes.

We entered at track 1 and needed to go up and over and up and over many stairs to get to platform 11. The train arrived shortly. What a tiny, messy engine. Little Engine that could had cute going for it. This thing was small, dirty-yellow and looked about a tenth the size of what was needed to pull the train.

We got on at the back of the car and had to push forward to the first 15 seats which meant crawling over dozens of children and not a few locals who seemed not to notice that we were making great effort to get between them and the seats. Remember we were all dragging suitcases and most all of us had backpacks too. It was lovely to find a whole seat of our own though the suitcases were under foot for the next 4 hours.

During the train ride a porter brought newspapers, tea and breakfast which was potato pancakes or omelets.

I spent part of the ride hanging out the door. There were goats, more dogs than there are numbers, garbage dumps, farm fields, vehicles, people, the occasional camel with or without cart and several men peeing calming into the grass.

Our guide, a gruff and uninterested man named Brahm, had us standing with backpacks on for 20 minutes before our stop but we followed him off the train and he arranged for transport to the hotel. The Jaipur train station was interesting. This time there weren’t many people inside of it so it was a great surprise to go out into the parking lot to see thousands of cars, taxis, buses and people.

We piled into a few tuktuks and went to the hotel passing trash and trashy places and worrying just a tiny bit about what kind of hotel would be our home for two days. The worry was wasted. The hotel was a cute, clean place with a restaurant offering good lunches. We settled in and then went to the city and the Hawa Mahal – a palace.

If Brahm was just a bit friendlier or interested I’m sure we’d have seen more but the city was exciting to drive through and he led us across a traffic circle in an oh-my-God tangle of fast-moving vehicles that makes my heart race again just to consider it.

The most interesting thing in the palace was the outfit of the man called the Giant King. He was 7 feet tall and weighed 250 kilos. His outfit was on display and included a shirt that would fit nicely around most of a baseball team. When the royal embroiderers had to work on something for him they must have put in some serious hours.

There was also a display with two large silver jars each with a 400 gallon capacity. When one of the kings went to Queen Elizabeth’s coronation he used these jars to carry water from the Ganges because that’s the only water he would use. I hope he had something akin to our ultraviolet sanitizer.

I liked a painting that looked like an elephant from the distance but up close it was clearly 9 women. The painting is supposed to symbolize that a group of ladies has the power of an elephant. This is probably because women didn’t have any power back in the days of royalty and actually they still don’t. The lead story in today’s paper was that India ranks 128 out of 143 countries in terms of economic power of women.

Brahm also took us to meet “his friend” but the friend was not a person but rather a shop where we were pressured to buy silk and over-priced scarves and items made with less craftsmanship than they deserved. He then took us to a tourist restaurant but some of us came back to the hotel instead since we preferred local food.

On Monday we went on the lam with the police after us though it was only the driver they wanted.

Rayeep was our entertaining and charming criminal driver. He let Monica sit in front with him and Rick, Gordon and I sat in the passenger seat. A police officer saw him and started blowing the whistle and calling him to stop but Rayeep jumped a curb and took off down a few alleys where he stopped and explained that it was not legal for him to drive without his uniform shirt on and he was also wrong to allow Monica in the front seat. A double whammy if caught so Monica went behind the back seat and he put the uniform over his shirt and on we went. It seemed that jumping a curb and running from the police was of no consequence as long as the shirt was correct.

We drove past the palace on the lake (sewage lake would be a better name) and I noticed an elephant on the other side of the road. I was too late to take a photo so Rayeep just turned around and went the wrong way into traffic to get to where I could take the photo.

Traffic seems to work like that here. Red lights and one-way streets and no parking signs are taken as light hearted suggestions to be ignored at will. Horns blow constantly and they are becoming unmanageably annoying. I’ve a life-time of horn beeps between my ears.

We heard a few traditional stories and learned that in Delhi the elephant is a symbol of power while the camel is speed and the horse is victory but here the elephant is good luck, the camel is love (generally it carried a happy couple) and the horse is power.

We also learned about natural dyes for fabrics. Green is made with spinach, yellow comes from turmeric and saffron. Red is made with chilies and tomatoes while sugar cane gives them white and indigo is always blue.

As a large group we went to the Amber Palace Fort in Amber. It’s HUGE but we only saw a bit of it. We went by tuktuk to the base and then got into jeeps to go up the steep, rocky road to the entry.

We walked through the areas of kings and queens. The ladies were never allowed out of the palace once they married the king. Each king had 12 wives but wife number one had all the power. The rooms were empty so it wasn’t really possible to imagine what they looked like in use with the floors covered in fine Persian carpet littered with cushions and curtains in doorways. The gardens and courtyard are under renovation but nobody was working. It was just torn up and left.

The tile walls and intricate carvings in the marble windows and on the pillars hint that it was once a gorgeous place. All around the fort are walls rather like the Great Wall of China but not as tall and certainly not as wide and long.

We meant to go to part of a Bollywood movie that night at India’s second-largest theater and Brahm said that we could go at 6 and get tickets and go in “No Problem.” (No Problem is a sound heard here nearly as often as beeping horns and I have had a life time of beeping horns already.)

Well, Brahm was wrong. The line for tickets was long and unexpectedly rowdy. Also there were two windows, one for men and one for women so we couldn’t understand if men and women could sit together or not. Men and women can’t buy tickets together unless they are married, apparently though that’s not certain. We heard that the crowd at movies is wild and that they sing and dance along with the actors.

Rick and I left but the others stayed in line but didn't get tickets because they were sold out. They ended up going to McDonalds while Rick and I walked past a clinic offering free first aide to traffic accident victims and then a place that sold firearms, not that we looked for either one. After that we got a little lost but we found our way and ate the spiciest dinner of the entire trip if not our lives and then sat around with others talking and drinking tea and water in the hotel kitchen.

Tuesday brought pain and regret. The dreaded scenario of a stolen bag interrupted our group. The selfish in me hugs my backpack fingering the lump of the camera and the bulky wad of passport and Rupees inside but there is a large sense of loss for Lynn who no longer has photos or camera, passport or plane ticket or the tiny teddy bear that her daughter gave her to carry away on all trips. It’s a mess for her.

Someone simply took her bag. She knew she shouldn’t let it out of her hands but she did and then it was gone. We sat at the train station while she began a police report and then we went on without her to check into the hotel. Brahm warned people about things all the time and I’m sure it is in part that he doesn’t want to help do the paper work of the police report. Still, it happened.

A group member, Jeff, let Lynn use his India cell phone to work on the problems. She had to cancel credit cards, arrange for some money to be sent to her, find out about a new passport, and talk with the airlines about tickets. She worked stoically for hours to make arrangements with not a glint of the misery she said she was mired in.

The worst part was in the police station where officers asked her all kinds of personal questions and when she said she had a 15 year old daughter but no husband they demanded to know why. She said she was divorced and they were angry wanting to know why she hadn’t yet remarried. Lynn said they made her feel like a dog.

Despite Lynn’s situation the trip went on and while we rode the train slowly through a station a goat was unceremoniously lifted by tail and neck to be put out of danger. The goat then went to the water pump for a drink. Other than the stolen bag, that was the most memorable event unless you consider the fact that four little kids walked back and forth the entire 4 hours of the trip or that the train was over an hour late so we stood in a sea of flies and stale urine on the track waiting.

I am developing new and profound definitions for these words: dirt, mess, smell, stench, stink, garbage, trash, crap, sewage, pollution, smoke, crowd, push, disorder, large, disgusting, horrendous, beggar and desperate. People have told me that I would love India but I can’t get my mind off the pollution that burns my throat raw or the smell that drives me away from things or the mess and disorder of piles and piles of trash that is never picked up but only grows and spreads in spite of the constantly nibbling goats. And the cow poo. It’s staggering.

We went to the beautiful Red Fort on the afternoon of our arrival. In the older days the fort had a 12 meter wide moat with crocodiles and a 12 meter drawbridge raised and lowered by elephants. It would have had guards at the door so that if the moat were breached boiling water or oil could be poured onto the invaders.

Anyone making it through the next door would be in a sloped alley with soldiers raining arrows down on them while the guards up hill sent down a huge rolling boulder to crush them.

We also learned about eunuchs. Kings had queens but they also had concubines – as many as 300. The daughters of concubines become concubines and the sons become eunuchs. The kings “enjoyed” the daughters of concubines as if they were totally unrelated since there is no lineage or parenthood recognized. The kings probably never even noticed the eunuchs. Tough life for all.

The mortar for the red sand stone fort was a mixture of ground sand stone, egg white, turmeric and sugar. That reminded me of the egg mortar used on the Charles Bridge in Prague.

After roaming the red fort we crossed wicked traffic to board our tukuks and go to the Taj Mahal. Gorgeous. There just isn’t any other way of saying it. Gorgeous.

There’s an entry hall and inside gardens and the Taj and a mosque and also a guesthouse. Interestingly Rick and I sat on a bench to look at the Taj and an Indian family stopped near us but on a higher level. The dad lowered their younger boy over the wall whereupon he came to sit with us. There was a lot of talking and hand movement and we finally understood that they wanted a photo of him sitting between the two of us so that’s what we did. I took their picture taking our picture and then we introduced ourselves to the boy whose name I can’t remember and we shook hands then his dad lifted him back up again. Why would they want such a photo? If you see it on the Internet, let us know.

Interestingly, there was one small light in the entry gate and the rest of the complex was dark. The sun set and in about 20 minutes it was almost totally dark when we shuffled in a mass of people toward that one light.

Wednesday we left Lynn in Agra waiting for her bank to send her money. She plans to fly to Delhi to get a passport. She may or may not rejoin us in Nepal since she must navigate bureaucracy in India on her own. Oh my.

The train station was the same: flies, people sleeping on the floor under blankets, food wallas, porters, an ice vendor, air ranging from smell to stench, and constant train whistles and car horns. Train stations here are smell soup and endless noise and movement.

The train, however, was on time and not crowded. To make up for that pleasure it rocked from side to side for all 4 hours. The view along the way did not include any goats being rescued or any camels working but the fields were being harvested of some grass. Already cut, it lay in the field where groups of women squatted and walked along like ducks to pull the stalks into small piles and lay them flat where the next group of workers would pick them up and make haystacks.

The other notable scene was of brick yards. These were visible in the distance because of their tall chimneys. One wonders where they found water for brick making since what passes for the local river was a few muddy spots under the bridges.
We were promised a 30 minute ride from the train station to the hotel in large, roomy tuktuks but we got a 45 minute ride in a small tuktuk. Ours stopped to buy gas and we learned why the gas pumps have tall metal pitchers with measuring cups on the pumps. The tuktuks need oil added to the gas. For 2 liters of gas, the attendant added one measure of oil.

Buying gas took time and then there was a bit more time spent waiting while our driver talked with a police officer who made him stop and more time still while about 10 cows meandered through a traffic circle blissfully unaware of traffic or danger.

I missed 3 great photos during the ride. First I saw some beautiful Indian women walking out of the fields carrying haystack-sized bundles of sticks on their heads. Then we passed a man riding his motorcycle while holding a chicken by the neck. The chicken was most displeased. Finally there were people-stuffed vehicles: tuktuks with guys standing on the running boards and holding onto the roof and busses with dozens of people on the roof. How do they get up and how do they manage not to fall off?

We had a snack at the hotel where I very clearly said that they couldn’t put milk in my dhal. We had a long conversation but they added cream and told me after I started eating it so Rick and I left and he helped me disgorge my lunch hopefully before I would suffer too much. It takes true love to participate in therapeutic vomiting.

Thursday dawned with chanting voices and flute playing. This is near the end of a festival when women fast and walk to the river to do a ceremonial cleansing and then carry water back to their husbands so they may drink it and live a long life. Personally I think it was an excuse to get out of the house because the festival lasts a month and involves traveling to many places to dip in the river which means no housework. Fasting means eating only fruit which isn’t bad when coupled with the no housework part of the deal.

We went to a complex with 300-500 year old palaces one of which has been remodeled into the Sheesh Mahal hotel and restaurant. The 400 year old buildings still have colorful frescos on the ceilings and walls. The walls were prepared by first coating them in lime cream. The lime cream is made by constantly grinding limestone mixed with water. Next a coating of boiled tamarind was applied and then the paints which were made with ground minerals and rain water. Most of the paintings were flowers and elephants or scenes of the 9 reincarnations of Vishnu.

Hindus have 336 million gods but the main three are Brahma (the Generator), Rama (the Organizer) and Shiva (the Destroyer).

We stopped in the Sheesh Mahalh for drinks when Jen pecked a bit out of her cup but someone said, “That’s just a tea leaf.”

“Well,” said Jen, “this is coffee not tea and that tea leaf has legs.”

This reminded me of breakfast when Rick was picking through the sugar crystals to choose what he’d put in his tea. I asked him what he was looking for and he said he wanted only white sugar.

It’s all white sugar. We don’t know what the brown or black bits are.